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After peaceful, non-violent Occupy Wall Street citizens were cleared under orders of New York City Mayor Bloomberg from Liberty Plaza - effectively suspending Freedom of Assembly, Freedom of Speech & Freedom of Press - we blogged Tin Soldiers & Mayor Bloomberg Coming on what seemed to us to be obvious parallels to Kent State.

Surprisingly -- or maybe not so surprisingly -- not all saw it that way.

"12:20 - UC-Davis chancellor, who makes over $400,000 a year, getting bombarded with protest mail and calls after the notorious pepper-spraying incident (see TWO videos below). The cop has been IDed also. Now, no one was killed, though some injured, in this case, but it does make me recall what happened after Kent State -- when I helped organize a complete campus shutdown at my college -- just one of hundreds where that happened. Can't say same thing will happen now but UC-Davis incident just latest in string of such. In fact, demonstration there was called to protest brutality at Berkeley!"

Four Separate Angles Showing The Truth of What Really Happened at UC-Davis

It looks as though he’s spraying weeds in the garden or coating the oven with caustic cleanser.

It’s not just the casual, dispassionate manner in which the University of California at Davis police officer pepper-sprays a line of passive students sitting on the ground. It’s the way the can becomes merely a tool, an implement that diminishes the humanity of the students and widens a terrifying gulf between the police and the people whom they are entrusted to protect.

The clip probably will be the defining imagery of the Occupy movement, rivaling in symbolic power, if not in actual violence, images from the Kent State shootings more than 40 years ago.

The police officer emerges from the margins of the scene, walks in front of a line of students on the ground with arms interlaced, and brandishes the can briefly in a gesture that feels both bored and theatrical, like someone on a low-budget television commercial displaying a miracle product or a magician holding the flowers he is about make disappear. He then proceeds to spray a thick stream of orange liquid into their faces. The crowd surrounding the students erupts in cries of “shame, shame,” questioning the police about whom they are protecting.

The spraying is slow and deliberate, one face after another, down the line. It is the multiple victims that makes it so chilling, recalling the mechanization of violence during the 20th century. Pepper spray, of course, isn’t meant to be lethal, and it was deployed during an effort to enforce university policy rather than a state-sanctioned campaign of violence. But the apparent absence of empathy from the police officer, applying a toxic chemical to humans as if they were garden pests, is shocking. Even more so because it is a university police officer.

Even if it is determined that the police followed proper procedures, the video might have lasting power for outrage, tapping into growing concerns not that police are abusing standard policies, but that our policies might need to be revised. Indeed, the disjunction between how the UC-Davis police read this video (they see an officer doing his job) and how many others read this video (they see a man in a uniform causing great and unnecessary pain to unresisting students) indicates that we have reached a kind of intellectual impasse about what kind of police we want and what limits should be placed on their power.

The UC-Davis video might open up a broader conversation about the proper role of the police, especially during an era in which it appears that protest against the established order may be more frequent and widespread. This new era of protest, if it continues to develop, will play out on the Internet, with rapidly uploaded videos providing not just evidence of what happens, but evidence from numerous perspectives, as each encounter is recorded by dozens of onlookers and participants.

Despite all the rights of free speech and assembly flamboyantly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the reality is that punishing the exercise of those rights with police force and state violence has been the reflexive response in America for quite some time. As Franke-Ruta put it, “America has a very long history of protests that meet with excessive or violent response, most vividly recorded in the second half of the 20th century.”

The intent and effect of such abuse is that it renders those guaranteed freedoms meaningless.

If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist. Every time the citizenry watches peaceful protesters getting pepper-sprayed — or hears that an Occupy protester suffered brain damage and almost died after being shot in the skull with a rubber bullet — many become increasingly fearful of participating in this citizen movement, and also become fearful in general of exercising their rights in a way that is bothersome or threatening to those in power. That’s a natural response, and it’s exactly what the climate of fear imposed by all abusive police state actions is intended to achieve: to coerce citizens to “decide” on their own to be passive and compliant — to refrain from exercising their rights — out of fear of what will happen if they don’t.

The genius of this approach is how insidious its effects are: because the rights continue to be offered on paper, the citizenry continues to believe it is free.

They believe that they are free to do everything they choose to do, because they have been “persuaded” — through fear and intimidation — to passively accept the status quo. As Rosa Luxemburg so perfectly put it: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” Someone who sits at home and never protests or effectively challenges power factions will not realize that their rights of speech and assembly have been effectively eroded because they never seek to exercise those rights; it’s only when we see steadfast, courageous resistance from the likes of these UC-Davis students is this erosion of rights manifest.

Pervasive police abuses and intimidation tactics applied to peaceful protesters — pepper-spray, assault rifles, tasers, tear gas and the rest — not only harm their victims but also the relationship of the citizenry to the government and the set of core political rights.

Implanting fear of authorities in the heart of the citizenry is a far more effective means of tyranny than overtly denying rights. That’s exactly what incidents like this are intended to achieve.

Overzealous prosecution of those who engage in peaceful political protest (which we’ve seen more and more of over the last several years) as well as rampant secrecy and the sprawling Surveillance State are the close cousins of excessive police force in both intent and effect: they are all about deterring meaningful challenges to those in power through the exercise of basic rights.

Rights are so much more effectively destroyed by bullying a citizenry out of wanting to exercise them than any other means.

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30 Comments:

I salute your willingness to speak truth and not be beaten down by those with fear in their lives. Face it folks, we have gone down a very bad path in this country and we are now going to go through some rough times for it. The Occupy movement are heros, nothing less, and they are exposing some very horrid truths about what our nation has become while so many of us were sleeping. Wishing it away won't help, and abusing those who see it only makes you part of the problem. HELP CHANGE YOUR COUNTRY FOR THE BETTER! Keep on rocking in the FREE world - that means FREEDOM!

It's not the fact that revolution is good, it's the bloody fact that it is f$%^g necessary to deal with a F!@#$%G (non)reresentative government that is not listening or reponding to the will of the people.

yeah, my kid won't behave, so I flogg him, or I beat him, or I stone him, or I PEPPER SPRAY him. WTF is up with this. Yeah crowd control. They needed riot police on that scene allright.

All this under Obama's watch not Nixon. I don't think he's president anymore. Maybe since he(Obama) is a liberal democrat we should blame the conservative republican congress or just hard working people. Need a little NY background music.

And we'll just add this on the Occupy & Kent connection from Laurel Krause, Allison Krause's sister who was murdered @ Kent in '70.

From http://www.facebook.com/KentStateTruthTribunal/posts/150071068425664

Posted on the White House wall: Mr President, My reason for this post is that covert federal groups & law enforcement officers are getting dangerously close to killing #Occupy protesters. Look at what happened at #OccupyOakland last month. If one #Occupy protester is killed Mr President, the blood will be on your hands as you did nothing to stop it. Peace, Allison's sister

11/20 Hoping the UC-Davis pepper-spray incident opens up a broader conversation about the proper role of the police & covert government agencies at peaceful protests, especially during an era in which it appears that protest against the established order may be more frequent & widespread. http://wapo.st/tFV0mn***How can you run when you know?

Tom--in the video *I* saw NOBODY is provoking the pig, but he's spraying them anyway...and BTW not all policemen ARE pigs--the "good apples" ya don't hear about...THEY apparently know how to leave their personal opinions at the police station...

Tom,Well, sometimes when we're Separating the wheat from the chaff, it can be tough to maintain balance.

Are you passionate?

Anyways, we have a tough time reconciling what we see and what we hear.

We see the police brutality towards #Occupy.

Then this from State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland in Washington on Egypt violence.

Nuland reiterated yesterday that the US is “very concerned” about the violence, but took a harder line against the military, which receives $1.3 billion in annual US aid.

“We condemn the excessive force used by the police, and we strongly urge the Egyptian Government to exercise maximum restraint, to discipline its forces, and to protect the universal rights of all Egyptians to peacefully express themselves,” she said. “While all parties in Egypt need to remain committed to nonviolence, we believe that the Egyptian government has a particular responsibility to restrain security forces and to allow the Egyptian people to peacefully express themselves.”

So. How can "we" the U.S. Gov't make the statement above about violence and peaceful protests in Egypt and NOT say the same to the NYPD about #Occupy?

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has issued an internal message ordering officers in New York City not to interfere unreasonably with journalists’ access during news media coverage and warning that those who do will be subject to disciplinary action.

The message was being read at police precinct station houses around New York on Wednesday. It came after journalists, including two from The Associated Press, were arrested covering Occupy Wall Street protests.

A coalition of news organizations had sent a letter complaining about the treatment. The news media argued that the police wrongly blocked journalists from observing last week when the authorities cleared out the protesters’ encampment in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan.

The A.P. and representatives of The New York Times, The Daily News, The New York Post and the National Press Photographers Association met with Mr. Kelly on Wednesday.

The podium rocks in the crowded waves.The speaker talks of the beautiful savesThat went down long before he played this roleFor the hotel queens and the magazines,Test tube genes and slot machinesWhere even Richard Nixon got soul.Even Richard Nixon has got it,Soul.

I’ve stayed out of this discussion for the most part, because I really haven’t followed OWS in minute detail, and so don’t know the accurate context of a lot of the discussion. But when I saw the video from UC Davis, I reacted in my own small way the way I imagine Neil must have reacted when he saw the cover of Life magazine. I don’t mean to trivialize the deaths at Kent State, and there is no way to equate the two incidents in this literal sense, but I do think that there is a fundamental similarity between the two that has simultaneously caused Thrasher to relate Kent State in the context of OWS, while at the same time causing a lot of people (including some posters to this blog), to miss the similarity. We’re not talking about a one to one correlation between issues, tactics, and police reaction, we’re talking about instances of people feeling the need to stand up peacefully for what they think is right, including when they may be wrong, in contrast to the refusal on the part of authorities to protect the process, to say nothing of undermining this effort through infiltration, subversion, provocation, or the presumption of moral superiority.

In terms of this blog, it seems to me that Thrasher is adopting the spirit of much of Neil’s music, and disposition to advocacy- to walk the walk of our passion for Neil’s music and lyrics- to “be the rain”. To me, this is the relevance of citing Kent State in connection to seemingly unrelated events generations apart. I don’t see this as advocating the notion that “revolution is always good”, or equating OWS to “Islamic tyranny”.

In any event, yesterday I was upset by the footage from UC Davis, and posted a picture of the pepper spraying, and then spent today reading various responses attacking the demonstrators (including this blog), much as I myself initially attacked the students at Kent State. I can’t give the subject a full treatment, but can give my take. This is what I wrote in response to a friend tonight, and thought to add to the discussion here:

“I don’t think anyone is protesting business per se, just business and government practiced in a corrupt way. You are right to point out culpability on a Federal level, but the source of our economic woes goes far beyond that. It started in Washington with the relaxation of particular banking and trading regulations, which enabled Wall Street profiteers to play the markets like a fiddle, to the detriment of investors, but really got cooking through illegal practices that Washington and regulators turned a blind eye to. Can anyone say “campaign contributions?” This systemic corruption is what caused the financial and housing markets to melt down. But the real origin of the economic mess we’re in has to do with the selling out of American jobs to globalization, e.g. NAFTA, GATT, WTO, etc. Members of both parties signed onto this, so it’s an equal opportunity list of scumbags who are responsible for the mess we’re in. There’s more to it all than this, but Americans are finally waking up and seeing the hand writing on the wall. The older generations are winding down their lives, and won’t be around to deal with the full consequences, but the younger generations know that it is they who will face a long future of deprivation, and so it is no wonder that they are the most vocal.

But let’s just say that these protesters are wrong about things, or wrong in their method of protest. It still is valid for them to be able to voice their dissatisfaction, regardless. They should not have to contend with a Tiananmen Square mentality in a nation that supposedly is set up to safeguard free speech, and free assembly. I mean, Americans did react with revulsion when the Chinese crushed popular demonstrations, right? Are Americans in the wrong now to react the same way to in kind police tactics on our own soil? You are a veteran, and I know that in part you served to protect the rights of Americans. Why is it so unacceptable to call for the protection of peaceful demonstrators from needless and brutal police tactics? O.K., the police didn’t go in swinging billy clubs and cracking skulls (not at UC Davis, anyways), but are we really going to split hairs about principle? These police were in no physical danger, and were assured by their authority that no one was going to risk lethal force or arrest by intervening to block their actions. And still this thug is going to treat peaceful people in such an inhumane way? What the hell kind of a country are we living in if this is acceptable? As the police retreated (with their tails between their legs) from the scene, waking up to the outrage that they had recklessly created, the rest of the demonstrators chanted “Shame on you!” Your damn right, shame on you.

I think you are wrong to think that all of this is going to blow over. Yes, the perpetrators behind the ruination of this country and the world at large are succeeding unabated, and the actions of a few demonstrators are not going to stop them from their nefarious agendas, but this incident at UC Davis, and other police tactics around the country, will be remembered by history in the same context as the attack dogs and water hoses turned on civil rights demonstrators back in the sixties. I know people in law enforcement, and believe that most police are decent people. I think it’s a shame that a few rotten apples are tainting the whole in this way.

I’ll leave you with one of my comments from another post on the subject, just to sum things up: ‘You never know these days with a lot of people criticizing protesters trying to bring attention to the politicians and profiteers responsible for the state of the economy. It's more complicated than that, but it's just amazing that this can happen in a country that supposedly values free speech. Yeah, yeah, the critics will say that the protesters had their say, but just like the Vietnam war that didn't go away immediately, the havoc created by the perpetrators in this story is going to be with us for a long time. Don't know what will come of the protests, or if they're exactly on target, but someone has to hold the feet of these miscreants to the fire.’

Oh, and one last thing. Even though I’m not thankful for this thug, or his superiors who sanctioned his actions, I am thankful for a lot of things, including agreeing to disagree with people. Happy Thanksgiving!

Well you know that it's hardTo be a reasonable manWhen you stop finding reasonsFor everythingBut tonight I'll get some answers thereOh OhAt the Medicine Show--Steve Wynn

First there is a mountainThen there is no mountainThen there is--Donovan Leitch

"There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks."--William Burroughs

You go to school andYou learn to read and writeSo you can walk into the county bankAnd sign away your life--Steve Earle

Why can't we all just get along?! Because after over thirty years of borrow and buy, shop until you drop consumerism the chickens are coming home to roost. We've been branded every which way, encouraged to be all we can be and never stop chasing that material rainbow that's always just a little bit past the horizon. Sit and watch your celebrities with their blingy dingy narcissism and become one with the vicarious zeitgeist. Work hard, play hard, spend hard, keep within the lines and just keep that money flowing.

But sometimes you can't turn a battleship around in the harbor, especially when everyone wants to be captain. Day late and a dollar short? Doesn't even begin to describe the mess that's been designed and is now overwhelming the dam of government and society. And what's the main message going on here? I think that Matt Taibbi put it best in his recent Rolling Stone piece: FTS! Like Matt, I was also skeptical at first about the "message" and the "tactics" of the Occupiers, until I remembered one cardinal rule: you don't fight fire with fire, you fight fire with water. And things are only going to get messier. I still have faith in America but the transformation is going to be brutal. And I saw a headline "Farenheit 451 finally out as an eBook"...you could maybe write a book about that statement alone! As Socrates said, "The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow." So for all those confused and more than a bit dazed, I offer this video of Wild Flag performing See No Evil...hang in there. To be continued....

Kent State & Jackson State was the last stand after years and years of violent protests and political assassins in this country -- going back to Woody's day when he was singing about the injustices of the working folks. People listened to radio owned mostly by fat cat sponsors who got rich off the labor of working class. They were very clever about how the censorship -- turning Woody & Pete into the bad guy "commies" because that's the only way people can understand it. Simplify it. Trivialize the importance of something very serious. It works every time.

People were killed during those protests as well. They were lynched, maimed -- all in the name of God, freedom, and mom's apple pie.

There was a reprise of "freedom of the press" when the folkies fell into the mainstream college campuses in the late 50s bringing the revolution into our homes on our television sets. What we saw was shocking.

Now everything is heavily censored so people can't distinguish reality from perceived reality.

Getting pepper spray in your face pretty much says it all. That's the beauty of photojournalism vs. propoganda. Somewhere in time, somebody wrote "you don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows..." Socrates & a guy names Bobby Zimmerman.

My dad asked me what that meant when he first heard it so I explained that the vandals are bad guys ruining it for other people looking for water. The vandals "cut off" a source for water for other people.

Went out earlier this morning for a quick trip to the general store, with No Hidden Path on the player. Walked into the store and Sail Away was playing..."I could live inside a teepee, I could die in Penthouse 35" seems kind of appropriate for these times eh?!

Got home and the stream in back is absolutely roaring from the snow melt coming down the mountains...15 inches for Thanksgiving and almost gone w/in a few days. Decibel level must be in the 60 or 70 level...told my son "sounds like Malibu with no break in the action".

Saw a couple funny comments earlier regarding Gov Perry's latest "talking points" and his apparent plan to change both the voting age and the date for election day:

Rick Perry in 2013 or 2014

He wants to eliminate the Department of Book Learnin'

I can picture Mark Twain right now up there in literary heaven, just wishing he were here again! Isn't life funny sometimes?

Just another note from the human highway! Days can be hard but don't let it bring you down....

U.S. Grant was actually was great American character. He was brave up to the end, finishing his memoirs just days before he died from cancer so his family would be cared for. He displayed the fortitude of a reluctant warrior. Much as Neil is the reluctant star, Grant was the reluctant public figure. Grant was the Neil Young of the mid 1800’s although he could not sing a note.